I am an attorney and I see people fighting over what seems like silly things all the time.

But you have to understand the feelings that people have over personal issues. People invest so much of themselves into businesses, property, creative universes (like Star Control) that it becomes very painful to see someone else taking it from you. So I can see where Paul and Fred are coming from. And Star Dock has paid money for the right to create a new game and they want some control over the direction it is going.

Having said this, they all need to get a good mediator and work something out.

Yeah. My guess, Stardock was relatively fine with Fred & Paul's project right up until the point where the hype for Shadow of the Precursors began to overshadow Star Control: Origins. The whole "fred and paul are stealing the community respect and the like" thing (along with SotP allegedly trying to "piggyback" on SC:O hype) sort of gave that element away, if you read between the lines. Now they want to knock out the competition, but of course, they have no proper basis to do it from. The whole idea is sad because the games don't have to be opposed to each other at all. All they really accomplished was to disappoint people. I've certainly lost any respect I might have had for Stardock with this move.

_________________"Sentient life. We are the Ur-Quan. Independence is intolerable. Blah, blah, blah." - the Spathi High Council, Star Control II.

I think it's entirely possible Stardock genuinely believed/believes they did buy all the rights they claim to have, even if Reiche is absolutely correct in his claim that the rights all reverted. That would make this a giant and stupid misunderstanding, for which the blame could be assigned either to Atari for not checking they actually could sell what they claimed to sell, to Stardock for not checking they could actually buy what they thought they were buying, or to some combination possibly including Ford & Reiche, depending on what happened.

The one thing I do not understand is Stardock's claim that they requested Ford & Reiche show them some evidence backing up their claim to have the rights and that Ford & Reiche refused. If that actually happened I just can't understand why they would fail to do something so simple. And if it didn't happen, I can't understand that either - that Stardock might lie about something so easily verifiable.

I hope we find out the truth, one way or another. I also hope this gets settled ASAP.

Stardock’s claim, that the Star Control trademark has fame and respect accrued to it, is absurd. We all saw the release of Star Control 3. It was obvious where StarCon was going. I am not a Star Control fan; I’m a fan of Paul and Fred’s games. I played the hell out of Archon The Unholy War, and Skylanders. Of course there were collaborators on Star Control II. That doesn‘t mean that Paul and Fred aren’t the primary authors of that game.

This lawsuit has likely doomed SC Origins one way or another. Either Stardock will lose the rights to the SC trademark, or they will have torpedoed the chances fans had for the Paul and Fred authored SC2 sequel the fans have wanted for the last 25 years, incurring those fans’ wrath.